20 books to read while you wait for The Winds of Winter

3. The Kingkiller Chronicles

Check out just about any “most anticipated fantasy sequels” articles on the internet, and you will almost always find The Doors of Stone, the next book in Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicles, right up there with The Winds of Winter — and rightly so. The premise is solid: a retired wizard-in-hiding named Kvothe decides to tell his life story in order to give an accurate accounting of how he went from being an orphan to the most famous magician in the land to a pariah all before he was 30). The science-oriented magic system is fascinating and the writing is gorgeous. The books also use a really cool story-within-a-story structure that flips from third person to first person narration depending on whether we’re with present-day Kvothe or he’s telling his tale.

This series has a lot in common with Harry Potter, and fans of Hogwarts will find themselves on familiar ground here. Kvothe goes to a magical university part way through the first book, and while I personally feel like his adventures concerning the school have dragged on a bit longer than necessary, if you love slice-of-life magic school stories, this one is excellently done.

Not that it’s all magic school, mind you. Kvothe crosses paths with bandits and faeries, mercenaries and dragons and royalty. And he tells you about all of it with style, panache and a fair dose of arrogance.

Now, the hair in the soup: Kingkiller is currently in a very similar situation as ASOIAF. The first book, The Name of the Wind, came out way back in 2007. The second, The Wise Man’s Fear, hit in 2011 — the same year as A Dance with Dragons. Since then, author Patrick Rothfuss has gotten progressively more close-mouthed about the status of the series, mainly returning to the point of “I’m working on it, it’s not going as well as I’d hoped, and it will be done when it’s done.”

If getting into a series with an indefinable end date is enough to send you screaming for the hills, you might want to skip this one. But if that doesn’t bother you, this series is so worth the read. There’s a reason fans are so up in arms about when we’ll get Book 3. The first two were among the best fantasy books to come out in years.

Lionsgate is shopping around a Kingkiller prequel show currently, as well as developing a movie adaptation of the novels, though there hasn’t been any news on the latter in quite some time.